Egypt’s Camel Revolution

Feb.13,2011

In a popular video, available in several versions on YouTube, you can ses the large square in Cairo occupied by the protesters who wanted a change in Egypt. The next thing you see are some unidentified subjects who rush into the square on galloping camels. Are they good or bad guys? Who knows, everything looks so chaotic. To a great extend, those camels symbolize the Egyptian “revolution.”

What exactly did the protesters want? Apparently they agreed on one issue – they wanted President Mubarak to go. They saw him as a source of all misfortunes of their country. Then they wanted jobs and democracy, at least according to the progressive Western correspondents.

With Mubarak out of the way, the first demand was fulfilled, but nobody knows what is going to happen next. With the military taking over and the largest opposition party dominated by Muslim fanatics, I guess you can’t expect anything good. Today there was a report that three Christian churches in Egypt were attacked and looted. On the other “revolutionary front”, Tunisia, things are not going well either. Italy has declared emergency because thousands of Tunisian refugees have flooded Sicily. Perhaps the Egyptians will follow them; the free money and food provided by the fools from the European Union are more attractive than a revolution.

Amidst the euphoria caused by the “victory” we can ask: is there any chance that they will build a free and democratic Egypt? The short answer is: absolutely not.

The whole situation reminds me my own experience as a very young man in the distant 1989, when I and thousands like me were conducting our own “revolution” in one of the Eastern European country. Just like our Egyptian colleagues, we were yelling, jumping up and down demanding the end of tyranny. Fortunately, nobody of us got killed, but we took our fair share of beating.

It was a liberating feeling. We thought that just with little more effort we will be able to establish a wonderful and prosperous society exactly like the one in Western Europe. Things didn’t quite work that way. After the collapse of communism, the whole economy collapsed as well. Instead of the enlightened wise men everybody expected to lead the nation, the power was quickly taken by not very smart, but pushy and arrogant people (among which were many from the former communist elite).

Everybody knows that despite the high hopes, most Eastern European countries are lagging far beyond the developed West. Frustrated that things don’t work, they are ready to vote for anybody who would promise change and then look for a new saviour at the next election. The conspiracy theories abound, many people are quick to blame for their failures the Jews, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission or any other entity they can think of.

And please note that this is happening in Europe. On the surface, there is very little difference between the Eastern and the Western part, people dress and act similarly. But there are deeper differences in the culture and traditions that drag the East Europeans down, for example the almost total disregard for law at all levels, from the common people to the government.

If Eastern Europe’s cultural differences hamper the building of democracy so badly, what can we say about Egypt? The country is so different from the West that its chance of becoming a democracy in the foreseeable future is practically zero.

Democracy requires a rule of law, but any type of law (the Muslim Brotherhood has already prepared sharia to be imposed on the country). The law must respect the right to property, personal safety and mutual respect. Those must also be the values, which most people consider the cornerstone of society. The freedom of conscience, religion and open discussion should be accepted without question.

Egypt is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, where they don’t share any of those values.

In the latest issue of TIME Magazine, Fareed Zakaria, who is supposed to be a specialist on the Middle East published an article, which was very optimistic about the future of democracy in Egypt. The editors considered it important enough to advertize it on the cover.

On page 34, the author lists the negative things:

There are certainly troubling signs. When the Pew Research Center surveyed the Arab world last April, it found that Egyptians have views that would strike the modern Western eye as extreme. Pew found that 82% of Egyptians support stoning as a punishment for adultery, 84% favour the death penalty for Muslims who leave their religion, and in the struggle between “modernizers” and “fundamentalists”, 59% identify with fundamentalists.

In the very next paragraph he points out the good traits:

That’s enough to make one worry about the rise of an Iranian-style regime. Except that this is not all the Pew surveys show. A 2007 poll found that 90% of Egyptians support freedom of religion, 88% an impartial judiciary and 80% free speech; 75% are opposed to censorship, and, according to the 2010 report, a large majority believes that democracy is preferable to any other kind of government.

Is the author out of his mind? The values in the second paragraph are totally incompatible with those in the first one. The idea of freedom of religion and the idea of death penalty for apostasy can co-exist only in the mind of an insane person. In the real society you can support only one of them at a time. Unless, of course, freedom of religion means “freedom of Muslim religion”. Then freedom and death can definitely co-exist.

The same applies to the rest of the values in the list.

Therein lies the problem with Egypt and most other Arab countries. If you base your values on the ramblings of a medieval warmonger whose major achievements were slaughtering everybody who disagrees with his cult and having sex with a 9-year-old girl, there is not much you can contribute to building a democracy.

Beside that, Egypt has no industry; its agriculture is in a sorry state. With Islam in control and lack of freedom of discussion, it is very unlikely to get any science developed. Tourism, the major source of income will be probably destroyed along with the ancient artefacts (an ominous sign of what is to come was the beheading of mummies by looters in the national museum, in the “old good” Islamic tradition).

Both options for the future of Egypt are equally bad. If the military keeps the power, the situation would not be much different than under Mubarak. If there are free elections, most likely the Muslim Brotherhood will win them. Then they will establish a theocracy much worse than Mubarak, but as long as they keep killing Christians and provide stoning spectacles, the majority will be happy.

Only one thing is sure under both options – there would be no jobs created. The people will be as poor as they have always been. There is no possibility of creating middle class and capitalism under Muslim dictatorship.

There is not a single democratic Muslim country. Turkey owed its democracy to the fact that Ataturk practically outlawed Islam, but now Erdogan’s islamists are working tirelessly to reverse that. Lebanon was a democratic country for a while, since no religion could establish total dominance, but Hezbollah is “fixing” this now. Even the cherished Iraqi democracy is fake. Only the American troops over there maintain the illusion. The minute they leave, the country would plunge into a devastating civil war with the “help” of Iran.

There is no reason to think that Egypt would be an exception – it doesn’t meet a single requirement for developing a working democracy.

Those facts don’t diminish Mr. Zakaria’s optimism. Here is his projection about the relations between the new “democratic” Egypt and Israel:

The peace between Egypt and Israel was never between two peoples but between their regimes. Israel might have to ask itself what policies it will have to pursue to create stability with a democratic Egypt. It would hardly be a cure-all, but were Israel to offer a deal that Palestinians accepted, it would surely help persuade Egyptians that Israel does not seek to oppress the Palestinian people.

So it will be up to the fanatical masses to decide. How many times did Israel offer deals beneficial to the Palestinians? All of them were rejected by their leadership. It’s much easier to play victim and get free money from the UN and Europe than to put some effort into building a new state.

Make no mistake, the new government will make the peace hopes even more delusional. They will probably open the Gaza border, easing Hamas’s access to weapons. That would make them even more aggressive, because they will hope that with the help of the anti-Semitic Egyptians they will destroy Israel.

The author has a recipe for the relations between the USA and Egypt as well:

The U.S. too will have to ask what it will take to have better relations not merely with Egypt’s military elite but with its people. And it will have to avoid the overreaction – common in Israel – that brands every move toward social conservatism as one toward jihad. Asking women to wear veils is different from making men wear suicide belts. If the U.S. is opposed to every expression of religiosity, it will find itself unable to understand or work with a new, more democratic Middle East.

So that’s it, folks – let the Muslim savages force women to wear veils and hopefully they would stop bombing us. There is a saying that there is never only one cockroach in the kitchen. The same applies to veils. The veil is just a tip of a whole pyramid of Muslim abuse inflicted on women – from denying them basic human rights to killing them. The Muslim Brotherhood wants to introduce complete segregation of men and women in public places. They plan to adopt a special dumbed-down curriculum for the girls’ classes. The level to which Egyptian women are subjected to genital mutilation is unmatched in other country.

So who is worse – Mubarak or the Muslim Brotherhood? It doesn’t matter, the result will be the same.

The only good result of that “revolution” would be that everybody will have to take a position. The lefty idiots who control Western Europe would have to react when faced with fanatical Muslim governments supported by the ignorant masses, who will start sending thousands of “refugees” with the task to bleed the welfare system and spread the Islamic poison.

Maybe, just maybe then they would realize that the West has values, which are worth defending.